FMCSA Drafts Shipper & Broker Guidelines Nobody Wanted

Despite warnings, requests and pleading by shipper and broker groups to the contrary, FMCSA forged ahead with guidance documents for “shippers, brokers and insurance companies” to use CSA scores in their carrier selection decision making. When word of the potential of these documents was learned, QualifiedCarriers.com, and the largest broker and shipper trade associations, TIA and National Industrial Transportation League (“NITL”) set an appointment with FMCSA, to stop, shelve, delay, or at least thoughtfully draft such a document, to avoid catastrophic consequences from misuse. FMCSA agreed at least twice, in public forums, it would talk with industry to hear its concerns before publishing.

So we were shocked when FMCSA published its documents one week before that meeting was to take place! Not only were shippers and brokers blindsided, but the documents published by FMCSA contained errors and misstatements. Another document falsely stated that FMCSA held “listening sessions with TIA and NITL,” and that the documents were in response to their requests—patently untrue.

CSA is very early into the first of two phases. It’s a young program that does not arrive at a safety rating, or safety fitness determination. It needs time to fill in enormous gaps in the data. Its methodology must mature and the agency must complete its most important, phase two. At that point, it will decide how the data may be combined, and used to determine a carrier’s safety fitness. This might happen in 2014. So, if FMCSA itself hasn’t figured out how to use BASIC scores to measure safety fitness, however could a shipper or broker?

We hope FMCSA begins to describes the CSA system appropriately, as a new system with a lot of promise, that it and its law enforcement colleagues use internally, to prioritize their resources, and leave shippers and brokers out of it.